Insight Community

If you were advising a private equity group that had an interest in consumer telecommunication services, where would you invest in the next 6 months? What areas have at least double-digit growth potential? Restrict your responses to North America.

The nimble development teams that create small and useful mini-apps sometimes face a point when acquisition by a much larger software firm is desirable. A moderate-sized blog tool firm is looking for the track records of its potential suitors (eg. Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, IAC, etc) for dealing with culture clashes and maintaining the usefulness of its products post-acquisition. From an insider's perspective, personal experiences and cautionary tales are welcome. From a users' viewpoint, describe how your loyalty to an acquired service was affected after your favorite widget-like software was bought.

We would like to compile the current size (# of providers, customers, revenue), historical growth, and potential growth in the wireless broadband internet market on two scales: 1) municipal wifi and 2) rural fixed wireless -- on a state-by-state breakdown.

This issue is clearly a tall order, so the first 10 acceptable responses to provide data and/or suggestions for obtaining this information will be chosen as winners. A follow-up issue to this project may be posted based on the responses gathered here.

Mywaves has created a unique embeddable video player (available at http://www.mywaves.com) with complete mobile capabilities. In addition to all the usual features of embedded players, it's designed to integrate with mobile phones and can be used as a viral marketing tool. With mywaves, users can send content from the web to their phones or to their friends' devices. Videos can also be uploaded directly from mobile phones and sent right to other users' handsets, as well as the web.

Mywaves is interested in the following feedback about its player:

1) What are the obstacles to adoption? How can they be overcome?
2) How can mywaves be marketed so that potential users can better see its value?
3) What groups of potential users should the company be targeting, and who can benefit the most from the player?
4) How can mywaves better reach that potential audience?
5) Mywaves is in the process of redesigning its site -- What are the top three ways the mywaves site could be improved to better attract and support users?

Please rank the following companies' media device strategy on (a) vision and (b) ability to execute: Apple for the iPod, Microsoft for the Zune, Creative for the Zen, Samsung, Archos, Sony. Rank each on a one to ten scale (1 to 10 for vision, and 1 to 10 for ability to execute), with one being the lowest, and ten being the highest. Please provide a short paragraph explaining your rankings.

If you had to bet on one single wireless technology to dominate in the next five years, what would it be and why?

The telecom space is facing an interesting convergence challenge, between mobile technologies, broadband technologies and VoIP. Recognizing that the trends for these technologies is inevitable, as a traditional telecom firm, what's the best strategy to embrace these technologies without completely destroying our core telephony business?

In the last few months, the online service Twitter has taken off. There's some debate if this is something really important, or merely a fad. Without necessarily rehashing that debate, discuss how a consumer packaged goods company might make use of Twitter (or similar tools) in innovative ways.

For context, in the early days of the web, plenty of traditional companies ignored the web and later blogs as passing fads, only to realize much later that they could have benefited from embracing such trends early on. As a consumer packaged goods company, we're trying to understand whether Twitter faces the same curve and if it makes sense to make use of it now, and if so, how could it be useful (if at all).

Now that Apple has finally announced the iPhone, plenty of attention has shifted to the potential for Google to make its own revolutionary mobile device. If you were in charge of such a product at Google, how would you design such a device? What features would it include? How would it work? What would you do to make it a valuable addition to the Google product portfolio?

Wireless broadband is coming in one format or another. When the world shifted from dialup to broadband, it opened up plenty of new applications and uses (many of which were not widely foreseen). What new and different uses will widespread wireless broadband allow? Will they be bottom up (designed by users) or top down (designed by carriers) and why?